When dream teams become reality

When Jim Carrey and Steve Carell were cast as a pair of dueling magicians in the comedy "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone," it hit us:

When Jim Carrey and Steve Carell were cast as a pair of dueling magicians in the comedy "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone," it hit us:

Why didn't someone think of this before?

Their careers had somewhat intersected before, with Carell taking over for Carrey in the "Bruce Almighty" sequel "Evan Almighty," and Carrey playing an interviewee for Michael Scott's old job on "The Office."

But putting them together? Genius, right? We'll see what the actual product looks like when the movie comes out Friday.

How about some other memorable pairings we may not have known we wanted or waited forever to see:

The legend goes that in "Caddyshack," they shot the entire movie before Director Harold Ramis realized one possibly fatal oversight: "Saturday Night Live" mega-alums Chevy Chase and Bill Murray didn't have any scenes together. So they went back and shot the "cannonball" scene and squeezed it into the movie. When DeNiro and Pacino appeared together in "Godfather II" without any screen time together? Yeah, that's how it was planned.

The myth would grow until they finally, inevitably, made a movie together 20 years later. The Michael Mann-directed "Heat" went on to become a well-respected (if not half-hour-too-long) crime thriller, but at the time, we knew it for one thing only — DeNiro and Pacino would finally meet. Their 15-minute quietly tense and effectively awkward exchange at a Los Angeles coffee shop was the money shot for which we had been waiting two decades. And now let's all forget that "Righteous Kill" ever happened. OK? OK.

Hold on. Are you telling me these two starred in 44 movies between 1982 and 1999 ... and they never made one together? Two of the most respected, beloved comedians of all time couldn't find a script to work on together? Wait, there's more! Of the approximately 8 trillion times Martin hosted "Saturday Night Live," he never did it while Murphy was in the cast. It's almost as if they were destined to be kept apart, until they gave us one of the most underrated comedies of this generation.

Look, you have to see it to appreciate it. It's a random, beyond-awful, made-for-TV horror movie on Syfy. We often exaggerate and say things are the worst movies ever, but this may very well be the worst movie ever. If it weren't so laughably bad — intentionally so, I'd hope — it probably would be the worst thing ever. This movie was made for the express purpose of getting these two late '80s bubble-gum pop singers together, on screen, for the first time, complete with the requisite cat fight. Who knew I wanted to see these two together, in a movie, 20 years after they mattered even a little? But you better believe I've seen it. Twice.

When certain teams get together, you want and expect to see them again. Astaire and Rogers. Bogart and Hepburn. Hanks and Ryan. Then there are those you can take or leave — more likely leave — so you don't necessarily think of them much after their first movie. That's Ferrell and Reilly in 2006's "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby." A good — not great or even particularly memorable — pairing. But when they got together two years later for "Step Brothers," they put together one of the five greatest R-rated comedies of the last 10 years, and its success is based almost solely on their chemistry together.

Michael Sadowski is author of PopRox, a pop culture blog at blogs.thepoconos.com/pop-rox. A longer version of this column appears there. Email msadowski@poconorecord.com.